At Home = Experience

Last week, Sue Shellenbarger of The Wall Street Journal tackled how you can transform efforts you've undertaken at home into experience a hiring manager might appreciate. The context is for people returning to the workforce after taking time off to raise children or spend serious time on other family issues. (Everyone says "people," but everyone also knows most of these people, for now anyway, are women.) Since attracting such folks is a priority of many of the larger accounting firms, it's helpful to know what works and what doesn't.

As tempting as it may be to talk about hard-won nurturing skills, most managers probably aren't ready for that. A mother might want to say, "Balancing the conflicting needs of a toddler and a teenager shows she's a good time manager," says Catherine Carbone Rogers, Des Moines, Wash., former president of Mothers & More, an advocacy group, and a former gap mom who has returned to work. "That may be true, but it's not going to carry a great deal of credibility with an employer."

The article might be on CareerJournal, too, but I found it on the paid WSJ site.

Turning Stay-at-Home SkillsInto Career-Track Assets [WSJ - $]